Slovenian Americans

SLOVENIAN AMERICANS. Approximately 200,000 Slovenians came to the United States from the Austro-Hungarian Empire between 1880 and the end of World War I. They came from what is now Slovenia and from the adjacent territories along the Austrian and Italian borders. Although Slovenians possessed a higher educational level than surrounding peoples, Slovenian immigrants found themselves overwhelmingly employed in manual labor. A majority settled in the mining regions of the Midwest and Northwest, as well as in industrial cities such as Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Chicago, where they commonly worked in the steel, iron, and automobile industries.

Due to their language skills, education, and ability to combine effectively with other Slavic groups, Slovenian Americans played a disproportionate role in American socialist movements, unions, and socialistically inclined fraternal organizations. They formed the Slovenian Socialist Federation and later helped form the Croatian and Serbian Socialist Federation. They took a leading role in the Yugoslav Socialist Federation, with Slovenian, Croatian, and Serbian branches, founded in 1909 and surviving into the 1950s. Proletarec (The Proletariat), organ of the Slovenian Socialist Federation, and Ameriski druzinski Koledar (Slovenian American Family Almanac) were published in Chicago for decades. The Slovene National Benefit Society (SNPJ), founded in 1904, not only provided its membership with life and accident insurance, but also with social and ethnic camaraderie and with a press, Prosveta, in which its readers could learn about socialist ideas. Its most famed editors, novelist-critic Ivan Molek and Joze Zavertnik, influenced community thought widely.

To the left of the Socialist Party, Slovians played a major role in the “South Slavonian Federation” of the Socialist Labor Party (SLP), in which Croatians and Serbians also participated, with their own press and calendar. Slovenian SLP member Frank Petrovich was, indeed, perhaps the most important public personality of the post-De Leon SLP. Although of marginal importance to the outside world, the South Slavonian Federation (and its organ, Radnika Borba) supplied funds to maintain the SLP’s public presence until the federation’s demise in the 1960s. Slovenians, unlike the Croatians, never participated significantly either in the Communist Party or its fraternal International Workers Order.

The source of Slovenians’ unique alignment within the Left can be traced to national sentiments dramatized by the world wars. The Slovenian faction did not follow the line of the Socialist Party against involvement in the war. Together with liberals, they helped form a Slovenian and later a Yugoslav-Republican Alliance (Hugoslvansko republicansko Zdrunznje), an organization that supported the idea of Yugoslavia as a federated republic. A Slovenian socialist leader from Austro-Hungary, Etbin Kristan—caught in the United States, by the outbreak of European fighting, while on a lecture tour—became leader of the organization. The Slovenian socialists rejoined the Socialist Party after the war and remained one of its faithful (if aging and gradually diminishing) sections, until leaving the party again, once more to favor war participation, in 1941.

Slovenians, like many other South Slavs, widely favored Tito partisans, notwithstanding the partisans’ Communist affiliations. They formed the powerful Slovenian American National Council with Etbin Kristan as president and Louis Adamic as honorary president. The council in turn helped form the United Committee of South Slavic Americans under Adamic’s presidency. A vital part of the American Slav Congress, they opposed the emerging Cold War as unnecessary and harmful to the new Yugoslavia. In their last major political act, South Slav socialists (and SNPJ loyalists) avidly supported Henry Wallace’s campaign for the presidency on the Progressive Party ticket.

Unlike the fraternal societies associated with the International Workers Order, the SNPJ escaped the worst of the McCarthy era repression and remained a vital community presence with insurance benefits and an ambitious cultural program. Its Prosveta, by this time a liberal/social democratic weekly with Slovenian- and English-language sections, continued to take strong stands on labor and social issues.

Klemencic, Matjaz. Ameriski Slovenci in Nob v Jugoslaviji. Maribor. Zalozbva Obzorja, 1987.

SNPJ Papers. Finding Guide. Immigration History Research Center, University of Minnesota. https://archives.lib.umn.edu/repositories/6/resources/4577

Stepanovich, Joseph. “Immigrant Workers and Immigrant Intellectuals in Progressive America: A History of the Yugoslav Socialist Federation.” Unpublished dissertation, University of Minnesota, 1978.